Golem25

@Titntin Will it, though? I always wonder. Tchia was fantastic but how many people actually download it off Extra? I didn't until it was announced to be leaving the service. It's such a shame we don't have data available for Playstation games, in the way that we do have it for Steam.

@RicebinBernacky If you go onto Steam, you can check the Curators list on the game's store page and see what they are saying - the game's Steam forum is also useful. A notable complaint on there is the use of Denuvo (anti-tamper / DRM garbage) but I'll leave you to dig further.

Ultimately, not a game for me - including but not limited to it looking really rather dull. I reckon Dave will be a fair bit more popular, definitely has more hype behind it if Steam is any indication.

@Haruki_NLI Quite possibly the best comment I've ever read on Push Square, nice one.

Nice. Server shutdown within 24 months.

Appreciate this might have gone over a few heads, but Strohmann means Strawman in Swedish if I'm not mistaken. Not a very fitting name for a completely independent and non-government-aligned news organization, whose news you absolutely must trust.

@StrickenBiged It does sound like everyone's having a great time. I've still too much to do via PS Plus but I'm sure one day I might fire it up on an alt account. I'm just pleased for the devs and the playerbase that it's been going so well.

Gee, the original bits are still great, and everything else is garbage. Who'd have thunk it, huh? The devs and Disney could have had a massive success on their hands here, but lack of care, effort, and allocating it a proper budget has backfired massively. They'll still walk away with a profit, sadly.

Honestly, fun stuff like this makes me sorta wish I had jumped onboard. Live services just aren't for me, but when they're done well like this, they can truly add to the experience in ways that a singleplayer game cannot.

@Fuzzymonkeyfunk Did you 100% Spider's Thread as well?

Just finished Tchia. Twice. Plat for PS4 and PS5 stacks. Excellent little game, very charming even if it has some rough edges (no mini-map, and your own location is not marked 99% of the time). If it ever comes back to Plus, be that in Essential or in Extra again, do take the time to play it.

Edit to say that I played Ghostwire: Tokyo a few months ago when it was added to the service. A good if flawed game with a gorgeous open world, with detail on par with or even exceeding that of the Yakuza / Like a Dragon games. Such a shame it is leaving Plus Extra now, doubt it will be back unless Sony's original exclusivity contract stipulated that it should come to Plus Essential at some point.

Does hunting in Yakuza 5 count? Much maligned, I know, but being stuck in that snowy village up in the mountains of Hokkaido was a really memorable experience for me, one of the best parts in one of the best games in the series.

And, as others said, cabaret was fantastic in all the games it appeared in. I would consider these examples to be more than just minigames - perhaps macrogames is a better word? A substantial but still pocket-sized game within a larger game.

I'm not sure if this helps, but I walked past my neighbour's house and he was playing it on his flatscreen while his partner was looking bored.

Personally, I don't own the game.

EMBRACER TRY NOT TO IMPLODE FOR LIKE A FULL WEEK CHALLENGE (IMPOSSIBLE DIFFICULTY)

Did they really need a senior community manager for a singleplayer series to begin with?

Taking bets on when the servers will be turned off. End of 2026, anyone?

I can barely believe it, but I immediately recognized the art style as belonging to James Turner, who designed loads of ugly Pokemon from Gen 5 onwards and became lead designer from Gen 8 onwards.

Just checked, he left Game Freak. Brilliant news.

Just remake Star Wars Bounty Hunter of the PS2 era. Bam, done. It still holds up really well today, but I'd kill for an expanded and updated version.

Sure, let's release it on XBox. Shall we say.... same release date as Starfield's PS5 version? Seems fair.

Glad to see the game being successful. Vocal minority once again turned out to be a minority, colour me surprised. Didn't buy it myself but I'm pleased for everyone who was hyped for it and had their expectations met.

Spoiler leaks aren't a problem when no one cares enough about your game to look them up.

> playing the Dub
> in Yakuza/LAD/Judgment

No. And I refuse to elaborate.

I've never touched even a single GOW game. Not changing that now. Hope everyone enjoys it, but it's just not my cup of tea.

@Danloaded I got the Platinum for Jett twice. Atmospheric and unique game bogged down by a few poor design decisions. I suggest you try it regardless for its unique qualities, it's not that long of a story.

Demolition was my fave PS1 SW outing, but we have that already. Getting Masters of Teräs Käsi like @tameshiyaku mentioned would be hilarious.

Where are my ports for modern platforms of Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories, Rockstar?

> playing Yakuza / Like A Dragon
> you picked dub over subs

Don't be that person.

With Yakuza maps, I want every single street to have something; I want to trip over restaurants, minigame spots, substories, collectibles, anything that has meaning and offers interactivity. It's one of the things that endeared me to the series, coming off needlessly large and soulless sandboxes pioneered by Ubisoft. Even San Andreas, for how great a game it is, suffered from it - there is very little point to most of San Fierro, for example.

Bigger really isn't always better, it shouldn't be a selling point. Yokohama was already stretched way too thin, but I'll opt to trust RGG Studio once more on the back of all the amazing games they've given us previously.

70% percent of assets are re-used if not more (including the tutorial prompts, as it turns out), but I'd still play a RGG game over literally anything else on my PS5.

Was always going to be the case, the UK and Europe are Playstation country. The time has never been riper for the fabled true COD-killer to come along, but unfortunately everyone has been so busy chasing the GaaS dragon that there's nothing forthcoming.

No physical = wait for PS Plus

It's really that simple. And this is coming from a guy who Platted 0, Kiwami, Kiwami 2, 3, 4, Dead Souls, 5, 6, LAD, Judgment, and soon Lost Judgment. I've been playing for over ten years but I am not going to stump up for a digital-only game. Might import the English language Asian copies for both PS4 and PS5 at some point.

I disliked how sparsely filled Yokohama was in LAD and LJ so going back to a denser map is welcome - I want to see an interactable restaurant or store every few steps.

That being said, I didn't realize this game was Sotenbori-only. On the one hand,I love that map to death, but on the other, it was completely and suspiciously empty save for the mid-game training dungeon in LAD. That's starting to make more sense now....

Should've put that dough towards a more valuable asset like SEGA. Would have netted you Sonic, a series that is trending upwards, Like A Dragon, a series that has never been stronger, Atlus, which will eventually trot out Persona 6, and a massive backlog of old arcade games that would finally give PS Plus Premium subscribers something of value.

But no. You had to get Bungie. Who have Destiny. And.... uh....

@Badger_Badgerski Please don't be hysterical. Humanity has gone through countless waves of great leaps of technology/innovation, and society has always adapted and used the platforms offered by new inventions to propel itself forward. Back in the stone age, I'm pretty sure Grog told Grug that fire very scary and wheel not blocky enough, but their descendent Greg in 2023 will be happy to have central heating and a car to drive to work.

If AI pans out, it will transform the personal and working lives of millions, sprout auxiliary industries (it already has - see the data entry factories in Africa), and antiquate a good few types of jobs. It already has been a force of good, when you think of cognitive abilities like text-to-speech models that help the blind, not to mention all the students and working professionals that have been aided by natural language processing models. This is only going to snowball with the advent of things like Microsoft Co-Pilot being embedded into Outlook, Teams, Dynamics, etc. I build chatbots for fun, and they massively benefit from light AI features like automatic entity recognition, making life easier for developers and users.

Conversely, if AI doesn't pan out, and we hit a ceiling with the various types of articifical intelligence (I do wonder whether we will ever be able to massively improve upon self-driving cars), then we'll look back on these years as being a weird mix of the Y2K scare and the Beany Babies rush where everyone was throwing money at something that didn't quite turn the dividends expected.

Just don't expect too much regulation. As strongly as you hope your government limits AI development, it will be nowhere near how badly foreign countries hope for the same thing. If you're truly fearful, then spend some time exploring how you might make use of AI in your own job, or how you may pivot your career to ride what you are suspecting will be an immensely powerful and successful industry.

Looks like salt is now the most prominent by-product of AI. If comments section were around back in the day, I could imagine the pin manufacturing workforce squirming just as loudly when the division of labour rolled in.

Domesticated animals replaced human labour back in the day, with horses and the like largely replaced by machines since (mostly in the "developed" world). Certain types of jobs became obsolete, others sprung up in their place, and new industries and professions arose alongside emerging technologies. Like different developments before it, AI will only be as destructive to your livelihood as you let it be.

This article talks about a miniscule script in what is, at best, a prominent indie GAAS made on a budget which will be shut down between now and 2026. An excellent use case for AI models, which cheaply provide part of the product, allowing budget to be allocated to more important areas. If I was head of this studio, you bet I'd do the same if it meant most of the VO budget could be availed to employ an extra dev.

I appreciate that creative professionals have pride in their work, and I'm sure there will always be a demand for artisanal literature, music, etc. well into the future (much in the same way organic food can still sell well, or how in the countryside families can grow and sell their own veggies), but when AI models have been trained/developed enough to not only match but also exceed human output, the only differences between human-made and AI-generated products will be cost and time to produce. With those differentials in mind, the question of 'do I prefer human-produced content enough to eschew AI-made goods' will be quite easy to answer for most consumers.

And when you think about it, we're perhaps already past this point. How many games use procedural generation? How many potential customers did these games lose purely on the basis of not every level/object/planet being handcrafted? I've played No Man's Sky, which to me (in 2023, not in 2016) is a rather decent mix of human and generative efforts.

Accept that AI is likely here to stay and here to grow, find solace in the fact that it will not just impact the little guy but is also likely to put a lot of banker type people out of a job, and spend some time thinking how you can adapt and benefit from its use.

And full disclosure, this is coming from someone who learnt a bit of C#, sat for and passed the AI-102 exam, and is now staying ahead of the curve. Maybe I will be caught out too eventually, but when that time comes, I'll learn how to be a plumber and make bank that way I suppose.

Kept us waiting, huh?

@Grimwood Thank goodness we have at least half a dozen of those (if not more, depends on personal preferences) and they're all titles from this series!

Christ on a bike, if I didn't know any better I would have thought the character designs were drawn by someone making fun of tumblr artists.

Who? Might have heard them in a bubble tea shop but the name doesn't ring any bells.

That's bizarre. Do they think this will make zoomies care about Alan Wake?

Of all the things to not have in the base release, this is the right one. Dub, lol.

House of Ashes! I was crossing my fingers for that to show up, beautiful! Going to Plat stack that bad boy across PS4 and PS5 after enjoying Man of Medan (one stack) and Little Hope (two stacks in the past weeks.

"ANGRY RUNS" written in the Angry Birds font? How do you do, fellow kids?

Platted this three times when it came to Plus Essential. Poor maps, poor modes (Hazard Zone, really?), all-around lacklustre. They must've lucked into a pod of microtransaction whales to still be going now.

Paywalled articles from newspapers I always punch into archive (dot) today. 99 out of 100 times, it will neatly take care of the block.

AssCreed 2, Brotherhood, Revelations, and yes, Black Flag too, were all chores to play back when they released. I can only imagine how dated Mirage would feel nowadays, no matter the veneer Ubisoft has coated it in. Easy pass.

I have the Plats for 3, 4, Dead Souls, 5, Kiwami, 6, Judgment, Like A Dragon, and Kiwami 2. They are some of the most rewarding Plats you can get, by virtue of the variety of things you are required to do and the determination and adaptability you need to possess to get through it all. 6's list was my least favourite for how much of a cupcake it was. LAD wasn't great either as it didn't require 100%. Looking forward to starting Lost Judgment next month.

Nice pool, I recognize that from somewhere